Dead spacecraft helps map Bermuda triangle of space

PEER into the Bermuda Triangle of space... A European spacecraft has given us a detailed glimpse into a dangerous radiation zone above the coast of Brazil.

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) is the point where the Van Allen radiation belts – rings of charged particles that surround Earth – come closest to the planet's surface. When the belts were discovered in the 1950s, scientists suspected the SAA could pose some risk, and as spacecraft electronics have become more complex, troubles have been on the rise. Astronauts' computers crash, and some space telescopes must shut off to avoid damage.

Riccardo Campana at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues are designing a space telescope that will orbit through the lower part of the danger zone, which is not well studied. To better assess the risk, they analysed radiation data from an older satellite with a similar orbit that regularly dove through the edge of the SAA.

They found that radiation levels in the lower layer of the SAA were much less than in the upper layers. They also saw that the anomaly is slowly moving westwards (arxiv.org/abs/1405.0360). The data can now be added to existing maps of the region, giving a fuller picture.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Finding the edge of a space danger zone"

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